Ana is working on a podcast player for the articles with audio versions. I confess it did take her quite a few attempts at explanation before I got the gist of the problem she was trying to solve. Visual cues were definitely required.

Turns out when you start playing the article audio, when you move away from that article you have no control over the pause/play button. Absolute travesty! Who designed this? Just kidding but this certainly sounds like a good little problem to solve.

First stop Amina. She’s rewriting the Guardian in C which apparently I’m told is one of the oldest programming languages in the world. I asked what the oldest was but quickly realised it was very likely to devolve into a very philosophical debate regarding the very nature of programming so I stopped it right there.

A discussion for another time methinks.

So why do this?

Because I want to learn C.

Fair enough! It seemed to me a bit like learning Latin these days. Not incredibly practical but kinda sorta pretty cool.

In short it will show the impact of the teams and fans travelling to the different countries for each game. It’s their belief that this should have longer term implications for any future large scale events (the olympics, music tours etc). Very good serious stuff.

With the data they accumulate they’re going to work out all the permutations which they said can lead to such headlines as “ England Winning Best for the Environment”.

I was amused but then realised that was a very specific headline. I asked how often England had won and the answer was never.